


Sly, Cowering, Timorous

by openacademia



Category: Dangan Ronpa - All Media Types, New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Angst, Gen, Heavy symbolism, Inspired by Poetry, Misremembered Canon Occurences, Pretty Vague Spoilers Tbh, Probably Lots Of Author Error, Spoilers, Tragic Insect Death, Writing practice, probably not canon compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-05
Updated: 2018-12-05
Packaged: 2019-09-12 08:23:57
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 821
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16869517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/openacademia/pseuds/openacademia
Summary: Kokichi sits in a room full of wings.





	Sly, Cowering, Timorous

**Author's Note:**

> _But Mouse, you are not alone,_  
>  In proving foresight may be vain:  
> The best laid schemes of mice and men  
> Go often askew,  
> And leave us nothing but grief and pain,  
> For promised joy!
> 
> _Still you are blessed, compared with me!_  
>  The present only touches you:  
> But oh! I backward cast my eye,  
> On prospects dreary!  
> And forward, though I cannot see,  
> I guess and fear!
> 
>  
> 
> _~ Robert Burns, "To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest With the Plough, November, 1785"_

The lock on Gonta’s research lab door was unlocked, as befitting the trusting nature of the gentle giant himself.

Kokichi pretended to pick it anyway.

After about twenty seconds of fake fiddling, he pulled open the door.

The gesture wasn’t as punishing as he thought it would be. For one thing, the lab wasn’t exactly crawling with creepy-crawlies. Moths, butterflies, and other flying critters flitted about variously, though there wasn’t more than twenty actually in the air. The tree’s green foliage was bejeweled with pairs of wings of every hue and sheen, though there was more shades of brown than any color.

There was a fair amount of winged insects, dragonflies and such, lounging on the pile of books in the center of the room. Kokichi waved his hand in the midst of them, startling away all but a couple on the far edge of the table.

He hoisted himself up onto the edge, and sat, looking around.

Kokichi pulled up Gonta’s profile on his MonoPad.

Gonta’s specifics were all there. Male. One hundred ninety-eight centimeters tall. Ninety-four kilograms.

His birthday was January twenty-third. Kokichi’s fingernail tapped idly against the date.

Thanks to Kokichi, Gonta Gokuhara would never feel the winter winds. He would never see the end of December, much less the end of January. He was gone forever, leaving his lab to either rot in this place or die of neglect.

A butterfly, fluttering away from the tree at the heart of the lab, landed on the top edge of Kokichi’s MonoPad. Its blue wings quivered as it scrabbled for a handhold on the smooth material.

Its wings stilled, and it settled, sitting gracefully.

Kokichi stared at the butterfly, its delicate wings moving ever so slightly as it rested. He twisted up his face into a nightmarish grin, leering at it.

The butterfly didn’t move more than half a centimeter. Its wings simply opened and closed as it shifted. Its sunshine yellow face peered at him from underneath the wings. Curiously, innocently, accusatorily.

He raised his hand as if to swat it. The butterfly beat its wings and took flight. Kokichi watched it fly away, hand still raised, almost as if in warning.

The warning was pretty much meaningless, as the majority of the insects that were already hovering about were avoiding Kokichi anyway, wary of the stranger in their midst.

Kokichi wondered how they all managed to coexist with each other, only treating humans as the intruders, the strangers. These were insects from all over the world, after all, not meant to share the same space, much less be trapped there. The lab seemed peaceful, so harmless. He looked about, marveling.

A long-legged spider, hanging halfway in the shadow of the screen in the center of the room, lounged on its silken web.

Kokichi spotted a green dragonfly entangled in the web, trapped halfway inside a silvery cage. It twitched, drawing over the glossy black and yellow spider.

The spider plunged its fangs into the dragonfly’s back without mercy. Kokichi looked on silently, unmoving, until the dragonfly was equally motionless.

Kokichi stared at the spider moving deliberately back to its old spot. He spotted a yellow butterfly, fluttering on a crash course with the cruel, beautiful net. He looked away.

_No need to look at that,_ he thought to himself. _Spiders are gross anyway._

He grabbed a book from beside him at random, flipping it to an open page.

The title at the top of the page read _Gonepteryx,_ with a bunch of similarly nonsensical-sounding names descending down the page, with small pictures beside some of them. _G. acuminata, G. amintha, G. burmenis_. Kokichi realized dully that those were probably the latin names of the group.

One caught his eye. _G. maxima._ It didn’t have an accompanying picture. He wondered what it looked like.

He looked up at the walls holding the extensive collections of pinned insects, all labeled carefully with latin names and common names.

He probably wouldn’t find it, but he didn’t have anything better to do.

 

After some aimless scrambling and climbing among the topmost bug shelves and any particularly thick frames he could use as footholds, Kokichi found a small, glass-fronted case labeled _Genus Gonepteryx_ ( _Brimstones)_.

He ran his fingers over the yellow wings of the fifteen tiny butterflies contained, a slightly different shade for every pair of wings. The specimen of _G. maxima_ looked as if it had been crafted from four pristine autumn leaves, freshly fallen, golden from the kiss of death, and not yet browned by rot or dryness.

They had dots in the middle, almost as if they were golden eyes, watching him, scrutinizing him.

He supposed he was used to it by now. Wary glances and stares were practically all he saw nowadays.

But in the back corners of his mind, away from cold, carefully monitored, and brutally disciplined conscious thought, Kokichi curled up and wished for something else.

**Author's Note:**

> Hello, I put way too much symbolism into this, but what do you expect from anything inspired by John Steinbeck?  
> I immediately wrote this after finishing his book _Of Mice and Men_. Lennie and George reminded me so much of Gonta and Kokichi, and after reading the ending I kinda stepped back and said "Screw it. I'ma write something now."  
> I was originally going to connect it more with the poem, but I settled for butterflies instead. Catch all of the symbolism and implications for a prize! What prize, you ask? Why my undying devotion and respect, of course!!  
> If you've noticed that Kokichi is uncharacteristically calm about all those bugs, it's partially emotional repression and partially me wanting to write about butterflies and insects really bad. I was really really disappointed when they didn't have Gonta just show everyone a bunch of super pretty dragonflies or something. So much potential wasted.


End file.
